by I dislike Collectible/Trading Card Games (CCGs/TCGs), and in particular Magic: The Gathering (MtG). CCGs feel like the microtransactions of the board game world, and all too often are quite expensive to keep up with. Yes, there’s Pauper format, but simply removing all the more powerful cards to preserve rarity feels cheap, in more ways than one. Admittedly, some of my distaste for CCGs comes from a desire to have complete collections, which is pretty incompatible with the roughly 19307 cards (x4 copies of non-lands) printed for MtG. However, the artificial rarity is what really turns me off of CCGs. MtG is one of the worst, with “white border”, “black border”, and of course the “holographic” or foil cards (not counted in the above count). The rarity is there to preserve the secondary market, which forces WotC to ban proxies at official events. There are arguments for banning realistic proxies anyway (counterfeit cards), but I tend to disagree.
What luck, then, that Living Card Games (LCGs) exist! A way to have a fun, extendable card game without the hassle of a secondary market or being unable to purchase a specific card you want from the manufacturer. But there’s a lot of card games out there, and most are terrible. In this article, I hope to catalogue the ones I’ve either played or heard good things about and review them as I get to play them more. I’m going to try and focus on mechanics over flavor, since I’m pretty setting-agnostic when it comes to my preference in games.
Magic: The Gathering (Tier 4)
I feel the need to include a review of MtG to set a baseline for the rest of my reviews. Admittedly, I haven’t played as much of MtG as I would like -partially because I just never got into it when my friends did, and partly because I never had a moment while playing when I thought “Ah, here’s a clever strategy.” Too much felt like just piloting (playing a pre-constructed deck) a pre-determined strategy with very little room for in-game thought – even while trying a variety of decks on Forge. While card interaction is necessary for there to be a card game (and there’s a lot of it in the tens of thousands of cards), that can’t be all there is.
A major contributor to this, and one of my biggest complaints overall, is the system of economy: land cards. Land cards are part of your deck (usually 1/4 to 1/3). You can install one land card per turn, and you can use each land card once per round to play other cards in your hand. A big part of the deckbuilding and early game skill associated with Magic is avoiding being land starved (not having enough land) or land flooded (too many lands, not enough to spend it on). My problem is that this system (combined with the one card per turn of draw) takes quite a bit of the economy out of the hands of the player, contributing to the feel of just “piloting” a deck.
When you can install one land per turn, not much is going to happen in the first two rounds. When your economy is “use it or lose it” you don’t really have to plan for the future, economy-wise. When you only draw one card per turn and 1/3 of your standard draw is probably land, your options don’t open up quickly. I realize there are many cards to get around this – I mean, Demonic Tutor is synonymous with the mechanic – but tutoring isn’t a game. Tutoring is something you do with your own cards to get more of your own cards – there’s no interaction with the other player. Non-interactivity is the bane of any card game, and it is baked in to Magic’s economic system.
I’m being hard on Magic because the perfect counterexample to all these problems exists in Android: Netrunner. Economy and card draw is entirely at your own discretion – you can win without a credit to your name if the other player isn’t playing well. Tutoring still exists, but in a very limited form, and only consequence-free on one side of the board. The first two turns can be incredibly significant on both sides – as a Runner, there are 8 opportunities to interact with the other player in meaningful ways in the first two turns – at least two of those are usually taken. The Corp has a chance of getting 3/7 of the way to victory in the first two turns, but doing so is incredibly risky and will set them back even if they succeed. Choosing which of those opportunities to take is a decision that has to be made in-game with knowledge of the board state.
This isn’t directly related, but I couldn’t resist talking about this article from Wizards of the Coast (WotC, publishers of MtG) justifying the existence of “bad” cards. I could write an entire article on my why I don’t think that’s the case. His main argument is that bad cards must exist by definition (point 1). This problem is evidenced by numerically superior cards for similar mana costs – power disparity is real (I’m distinguishing this from power creep, in that there are just numerically worse cards in similar sets). It’s nowhere near as bad as Yu-Gi-Oh! or Pokémon, but it’s there. The author even calls it out by saying “could we make a large expansion where all the cards see play? Yes, in theory….” His justification for not doing that is that no one would buy more cards later that weren’t as good, or that you’d have to increase the power level. The best counterpoint to this is, again, Android: Netrunner. There are very few truly bad cards in Netrunner – well, except Process Automation and Build Script. Most simply explore a different design space – and many of the best (or at least most widely-used) cards are in the base game. In MtG, both the limited mechanics of the game and the sheer volume of cards available limit the ability to explore new ideas.
The rest of the defenses offered by the author fall mostly into the camp of “this card isn’t for you” (items 2, 4, 5, and 6), which I feel is a bit of a complaint about people not seeing the value of a card rather than the card actually being bad. And, sure, that’s a problem – but it’s not really the problem people are complaining about and it’s not really answering the question of why a seemingly large number of less effective cards are released. But, as point 7 states, “R&D is only human” – and I certainly wouldn’t want the job of designing cards for Magic. They are far better at it than I would be, after all; game design is one of the hardest things to get right. And I certainly wouldn’t want to deal with all the people on self-published blogs disagreeing with them all day.
Finally, point 3 states that some cards are “learning” cards where you learn over time that the card isn’t as good as it seems. This has some merit, but should only account for a very small percentage of cards. Even more, it would be better if a card was simply more situational than it seemed. In yet another comparison with Netrunner, ICE cards for the Corp seem super-powerful at first until you realize that their effects are almost never going to happen. Other cards might seem overpowered or pointless until you realize they have a strategic strength or weakness. But neither of these makes the cards unplayable or “bad” in any numerical sense. It simply means you need to play them smarter. This sense of when to play a powerful card (or whether you should hold back some resources so you can) just isn’t as prevalent in MtG as it is in Netrunner.
Despite all this, I have to credit both MtG and Richard Garfield (its creator) for coming up with the idea of a extendable card game. I doubt LCGs could exist at all without the precedent of a CCG, and Richard Garfield went on to make my favorite card game of all time – so I shouldn’t complain too much. That doesn’t mean I’m happy with it. Magic is truly a terrible game – both the business model and the mechanics. The flavor is okay – but as I mentioned, that’s not the focus of these reviews.
Android: Netrunner (Tier 1)
This one is one of the best, if not the best. I wrote a review of it earlier, and little has changed since then. Well, other than the game getting cancelled and then picked up by a fan movement. I think that the feature which really sets Netrunner apart is its asymmetry. In most symmetric games, Chezni and I find many cards that essentially read “Cancel what that other person just did.” In Chezni’s words, “it’s more fun to add something than to take away something.” But all too often, many cards are printed that do just this. I’m currently of the opinion that this is inextricable from a symmetric game. Eventually, most actions degrade into “my number is bigger than your number, so what you were trying to do doesn’t work.” Netrunner sidesteps this by letting one player control the hidden information but have the harder task and one player with more powerful tools but limited information. It’s more poker than chess. But better than both.
Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game (Tier 3)
There are several problems with this game. It began when Chezni and I first started playing with the core set. Some games have well-written rulebooks. Some have terribly, terribly written rulebooks, but once you get your head around the rules, things go smoothly. In, Legend of the Five Rings (L5R), the game never started going more smoothly. It just got longer. The number of core mechanics just fills your working memory before you even get to the cards themselves. In case you think I’m overstating the number of distinct mechanics involved, here are the ones off the top of my head: Honor and honor dials, Fate, Provinces, Strongholds, Conflict decks and Dynasty decks, Keeper and Seeker roles, Rings and ring effects, Military vs. Political struggles, Glory with Honored and Dishonored statuses (different from the Honor mentioned previously) and the Imperial Favor, an unreasonably restrictive influence system, and the first player token. Netrunner had quite a few base mechanics as well, but the difference was that they were split between the Corp and Runner (so you only have to keep track of the ones that affect you), many might not come up at all during a game (Viruses, Bad Publicity, etc.), and the rest were usually straightforward (credits are money).
That influence system is worth exploring a bit more. The number of restrictions and caveats made it almost seem like the designers didn’t actually want you to customize your deck. Only very specific cards from one of your decks (you play with two) can be “purchased” from another faction, for up to three influence points per card. In a 45 card deck, you only get around 11 influence – which is 4 3-point cards or 5 2-point cards. Since you can have three copies of a single card in a deck, that means you can’t even get two full playsets of a card from another faction unless they cost 1 point. Additionally, you can only purchase cards from a single other faction of the seven – no mixing and matching three faction’s cards. Since there were so many factions and so little influence, deckbuilding with just the Core set boiled down to “take all the cards from your faction and maybe two or three neutral cards.” Worst of all, most faction cards only had a single copy included, meaning decks were going to be inconsistent – the bane of any player trying to build a strategy. While only having a Core set is a limitation in all deckbuilding games, in L5R there was practically no deckbuilding at all.
Once play begins, two additional problems become apparent. The primary win condition is to break three of the opponent’s four provinces, then break their stronghold. There are two “battles” per round – one diplomatic, one political. Although unlikely, this means a game can be over in two rounds. The games I played usually did not go past three or four, with the winner clear after the first or second. This trouble stemmed from two sources. First, there is no advantage to defense. Your characters are around for a limited time, so letting them go without attacking just means you wasted resources. A pure defense is no guarantee of stopping an attack from breaking your province, so you might as well attack as frequently as you can, given your resources.
Second is a frustratingly common problem with card games where there are mechanics that let you win more when you start winning. Chezni and I referred to it as the “win more to win more” problem (truly an original idea, I know). It’s far too easy to accidentally introduce this to a card game, because cards that have actions only when you succeed at something is a tempting card design. In L5R, this problem presents itself in several ways. The cards themselves often have this built in, but the base mechanics contribute as well. Ring effects, which you can claim when you win a combat, give you a small boost. The Imperial Favor gives you a small boost for having the most Glory (including battle victories), and breaking a province during a combat means you can potentially get rid of valuable cards from the other player’s board. Finally, battles are an exercise in bidding higher until someone bids too much – you might win a battle but lose the war since there are so few opportunities to get ahead. These, individually, wouldn’t be the worst, but together they form a critical mass of “win more to win more” conditions.
It’s not all bad. The flavor is nice, and I like the idea behind summoning your fighters for a limited time with Fate. In a different game, the strategy of winning through diplomacy instead of conquest – uncovering your opponents dishonor in their imperial machinations – could work well. Unfortunately, the game tries to do too much and makes a complicated mess out of things. I cannot recommend L5R, but it took Chezni and I a long time to come to that conclusion. There are a lot of interesting mechanics and a lot to like, but it is outweighed by the poor execution.
Star Wars: The Card Game (Tier 3)
Sadly, I was also disappointed with this one. The theming is strong, Objective Sets accomplish an interesting goal, and Edge battles are a fascinating concept, but the rest of the game has too much of a “just another Magic clone” aftertaste. But let’s start with the good things.
First off, the card design and general aesthetic are probably my favorite among all the card games I’ve played. Perhaps that’s why I kept wanting to like it – the cards are just fantastically designed: simple, with large pieces of art, but with enough information to support a variety of mechanics. The cards feel like a consistent part of a whole, rather than a hodgepodge of different ideas thrown onto a piece of cardboard (I’m looking at you, L5R).
Objective sets are how you build your deck. Instead of choosing 50 cards to be your deck by themselves, you choose Objective Sets which come with an Objective and five cards for your deck. I find this a fascinating design choice, since it allows the designer to make cards that work well with each other with less fear of them enabling an unforeseen overpowered combo. At the very least, it prevents card combos that rely on more than a couple cards, since getting those cards together requires you to fill up most of your deck with things you may or may not be able to use.
The objectives themselves are similar to the Stories from Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game, though they are unique to each player. There is a slight asymmetry to the game, as the Dark Side player is trying to rack up 12 points (gained from time spent during the game, controlling the balance of the Force, and destroying objectives), while the Light Side player “simply” has to destroy three objectives. This gives a nice inevitability to the game, as well as letting the Dark Side have some more directly powerful abilities without entirely unbalancing the game.
Edge battles are the final distinctive part of the game. When starting a combat, you can gain an “edge,” allowing you to strike first and gain some extra damage by sacrificing cards in your hand (there are also Edge-specific cards that can alter outcomes). To a degree, it reflects a poker match where you bet higher and higher to gain an advantage until you overextend yourself. Though it feels similar to the battles in L5R (I’m talking about the reboot here), losing the Edge in a Star Wars game is a lot less damning than losing a high-investment battle in L5R.
Unfortunately, this is also where it starts to break down. Since this is still a game from the era of Magic clones, killing your opponents creatures is often what really matters. The edge you gain by winning the Edge battle is sometimes a little too strong, and the ability to strike first whether you are attacking or defending can often decide the match. In our games, it too often came down to almost entirely ignoring the other player until you have enough forces to strike all at once. I admit that this will probably happen less often as you get better at the game, but it leaned too much toward the feel of L5R for comfort.
The other trouble was resources. You start out with a set number of resources and can get more with certain cards. Each turn, you can drain the resources to pay for things – but the more resources you take from a card the more turns it will take to get it back. This isn’t an entirely bad idea and can lead to some good strategies, but it is a boring mechanic for me. I much prefer the system of banked credits from Netrunner (or even Fate from L5R). When you have a limited quantity of resources every round – and especially when they take longer to refresh the more resources you use – it feels unnecessarily stifling. It’s designed to encourage faster strategic play, but it limits the long-term strategy since you can’t save resources for a high-cost surprise. Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game did something similar, but in a far superior way by allowing you to bank cards in three “domains” which generate your resources each round. This allows you not only the strategy of which domains to invest in, but creates an interesting action economy across both your turn and your opponent’s. Perhaps this wouldn’t bother me so much in Star Wars had I not played games with better economic systems before.
When it comes right down to it, though there are interesting concepts in this game, it just hasn’t broken with the MtG traditions enough for it to be something truly special. If you like MtG and Star Wars, then this game is probably a good bet. If not, then the problems inherent in the MtG style of play will probably bother you. It’s almost great, which is what makes it so disappointing. That being said, this game has theming in spades – and because the Star Wars brand is popular, you’ll probably have the best luck with either this or Lord of the Rings if you’re trying to get friends to play with you. Because of that, this the only game that I repurchased despite not being Tier One.
Arkham Horror: The Card Game (Tier 2)
Arkham Horror is a co-op game set in the Cthulhu mythos. When Chezni and I first played, we tried it on the highest difficulty with the most combat-averse characters. This was a mistake. This game is not forgiving, and requires having at least one character be good at combat. Still, it was a fun time and does give a fairly good approximation of a session of the Call of Cthulhu RPG. But that’s also sort of the problem (for me, at least). Why would I play Arkham Horror when I could play Call of Cthulhu? Too much felt like a limited version of an tabletop RPG. A well made version, to be sure, but lacking purpose (unless no one in your group wants to be the DM, which is a totally legitimate use case).
Lord of the Rings: The Card Game (Tier 1)
Lord of the Rings: The Card Game (LotR) was FFG’s first foray into a cooperative LCG (to the best of my knowledge). I’d heard online from several sources that Arkham Horror much like a LotR 2.0, which worried me because Arkham Horror felt somewhat out of place as a card game: neither enough of a card game to make me want to invest in hundreds of cards nor enough of an RPG for me to want to play it instead of the actual Call of Cthulhu RPG. I was pleasantly surprised to find that LotR is a strangely more enjoyable game.
In several ways, Arkham Horror does feel like a LotR 2.0. The Locations in Arkham Horror are handled better and open up far more interesting mechanics than LotR. The flavor is a lot more persistent and integrated into the mechanics, making every round really feel like an adventure in the Cthulhu Mythos. On the other hand, LotR could be set in practically any fantasy setting (of course, that may just be because LotR is the quintessential fantasy setting) and the flavor felt more like set dressing than something woven into the mechanics. Ironically, lacking these elements distinguished LotR from its RPG counterparts and made it feel like its own game, rather than just an automated RPG session.
In Arkham Horror, it often felt like you were just hanging on for dear life and could be easily defeated by a bad draw of Chaos Tokens – and to be fair, that’s quite in line with an Eldritch Horror game. In Lord of the Rings, failure is more of a wearing down over time and one where you have a lot more control over what kills you in the end (you choose who defends against which monsters, and thus where the damage goes). There was, seemingly, a lot more dependence on your second player (from a Core Set perspective) to fill the gaps in your effort and a lot more interaction to keep your partner in the game.
The high fantasy of LotR made for an experience that I was happy to fill in my own flavor, as opposed to the oppressive atmosphere of the Arkham Horror game. While this may be simply a personal preference, I feel as though the nature of eldritch horror lends itself more to an RPG while the high fantasy of LotR is better suited for a card game – simply because in a card game you want to win instead of just telling a good story. I’m happy to have a character go insane and fall into an eternal abyss if I’m playing an RPG because that’s an interesting story – but in a card game I’d like to feel as if I’m doing something other than just not dying.
I’d like to clarify by saying that I’m mostly referring to the atmosphere of the game and mechanics when I say that Arkham Horror felt less good to play than LotR’s high fantasy. Both games had difficulties that ramped up quickly, and it was only through better play that Chezni and I were able to beat the subsequent campaigns in LotR.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in this section talking about the game’s atmosphere, simply because the mechanics were, by and large, nothing special. If you’ve played Magic: The Gathering or any of FFG’s other LCGs, LotR will probably feel at least somewhat familiar. What sets LotR apart is both its simplicity in basic mechanics and its high level of card interaction. It didn’t take long to pick up all the important aspects of the game, and there were already some fantastic card combos just in the core set with two thrown together, basic decks. I’d probably say that this was the best single-box Core Set experience I’ve had so far: with the caveat that the number of quests included makes for what felt like a short experience and encouragement to buy expansions. Otherwise, it’s on equal footing with Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game (see below), but surpasses both Arkham Horror and Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn in my opinion.
Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game (Tier 1)
After playing Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game (CoC), I found myself repeatedly comparing it to Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) – but in a good way. They are both Magic-like “my monsters vs. your monsters” games. They both have occasional cards which read “cancel what that other person does” (which is a terrible design philosophy). But where L5R has unnecessary complexity, CoC has simplicity.
In CoC, there are only one set of tokens. That’s it. Everything else is a standard sized playing card. Some people may enjoy opening a box and seeing a plethora of tokens and differently sized cards, but I really appreciate having something I can play with any variety of dice, tokens, or other markers and not have to worry about whether that token was a power counter, damage token, resource, Fate, or something else. This simplicity carries through to the card design as well. All your monsters have 1 HP (unless, of course, the card says otherwise). You need five points to win one of the “stories” and you need three stories to win the game. Besides combat (which I’ll get to in a moment) and domains, that’s basically it for the game. The simple base game design makes this game fun and a lot more varied than you might expect.
Perhaps my favorite innovation was that all your cards are land cards, in MtG terms. At the start of the game, you just choose three cards to be your starting resources (called domains), which you gradually build up over the course of the game to pay for bigger and more terrifying monsters. This doesn’t feel restrictive or like you have to include trash cards because there is strategy in how you build up your domains and there are almost always ways of getting those cards back if you really need them. One of the rounds we played I turned the game around by getting back an expensive card I had used as a domain card earlier when I couldn’t have afforded to pay for it. There’s an absolutely terrible Final Fantasy TCG we played that tried this, but it had you discarding your cards to pay for things once – which meant that you truly were including trash cards. In CoC, they never really feel lost (and you get to use them round after round). Every card feels valuable, even if you end up using it just to feed your domains.
Each faction plays quite differently, thanks to a unique combat flow. The struggle for the story cards has four stages – Terror, Combat, Arcane, and Investigation. During our few rounds of this game, I realized I kept miscalculating the advantage in these struggles. If you lose the Terror struggle, one of your characters goes Insane (and can’t help you any more). If you lose a Combat struggle, you get a wound (which might kill a character). If you win the Arcane struggle, you get to keep a character ready for another round. If you win the Investigation struggle, you get to add an additional success token on the story. Then, once all that’s done, you see who contributed the most skill (a different ability entirely) to determine who won the overall conflict – and add an additional success token to the story. Each faction has different strengths when it comes to these struggles, and each faction has a unique way of mitigating their weaknesses.
I explain all that because it is unlike all the other combat systems I’ve played so far. This rock-paper-scissors like icon struggle is a fantastic solution to the problem of keeping factions unique and useful in a game that, at the end of the day, is still “your monsters vs. my monsters”. There are still the same problems of “cancel what the other person did” cards and a few cards that can set up game-breaking combos a little too early in the game, but on the whole it never felt like an inherently broken system like Magic: The Gathering or Legend of the Five Rings. CoC was FFG’s first foray into the LCG format, and it shows when compared to their more recent offerings, since it still feels a bit like a game created in the shadow of Magic. I would never call it a Magic clone, though, since it does so many things differently and it does them very well indeed.
Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn (Tier 3)
The first non-FFG LCG (on this list)! I really want to like Ashes. When I first read the rules, it sounded like someone had played MtG and thought: “Hmm…this is nice and all, but we need to fix this. And this. And this. And why would you rely on card draw for mana? That will just always lead to problems.” That’s almost how it turned out: a version of MtG where they fixed a lot of the problems – from how you gain mana (dice, not land cards), introducing consistency (you choose your first five cards rather than taking mulligans), and making it dead simple to get into (every expansion is a playable deck). Every deck is exactly 30 cards, and the rules for deckbuilding are very simple. Games are played very quickly (possibly too quickly).
Unfortunately, this simplicity is also its downfall. In the games we played, it almost seemed as if the best strategy for any given character was already determined and the best cards for that character came prepackaged. Playing anything else immediately felt underpowered. And of course, it also has the problem of having too many cards which just cancel another action. It felt more like a deck buying game rather than a deck building game – it would need a couple hundred extra cards to really open up. Despite this, I very much enjoyed the dice mechanics as there was just enough interaction with them to make them feel exciting without making you feel beholden to rolls of the dice. In the end, though, Ashes felt too limited when deckbuilding – albeit quite fun to play if you don’t have much time to build decks.
Doomtown: Reloaded (Tier 1)
My feelings about Doomtown: Reloaded, a western/sci-fi flavored competitive game, ran the gamut. At first, I was convinced it was a game with almost entirely random outcomes – no better than those party games I hate to play. It seemed like you were just drawing through your deck to play fake poker hands with no real purpose, and that shootouts could be decided by sheer luck of the draw (which is actually true, but has intricacies I wasn’t initially thinking about). Most of my complaints stemmed from the fact that your deck is 52 cards. Every card has a suite and value, and you use those suites and values to determine who is the First Player and who wins shootouts.
Things first started getting interesting when I learned the deckbuilding rules: Each suite of cards is a different card type – Spades are Dudes, Hearts are Goods, Diamonds are Deeds, and Clubs are Actions. You can have up to four copies of any card name and only four copies of any given card rank and suite (so, if I have four copies of Bluetick – a Two of Hearts – I can’t include any copies of Peacemaker, which is also a Two of Hearts). I’ve only played a few games so I don’t know if PEG have been able to actually balance cards this way, but it shows a great deal of promise. If you don’t get excited by this idea, then this might not be the game for you (unless you like Westerns).
Now, you may have noticed that the rules above allow for horribly illegal card hands – and remarkably, this is integrated into the mechanics. If, during the First Player phase or the Shootout, you reveal a poker hand that is illegal (say, Five of a Kind), your opponent can often use action cards that only work if you’ve “Cheated”. At the same time, you’re encouraged to keep cards in your deck that are of similar rank if you want to win shootouts (Five of a Kind is one of the highest ranked hands). It’s a balancing act that I thought was ridiculous until I realized the game literally has poker breaks every few minutes where you can stack the deck horribly in your favor.
One final note to round out the deckbuilding aspect of Doomtown: all faction cards are Spades, and there are no limits to how many out-of-faction cards you can include. During gameplay, however, you’re required to pay extra to keep those characters around which works well both from a gameplay perspective (you only want to splash for a card if it really ties your strategy together) and from a flavor perspective (you have to be willing to bribe the other faction to join you). Doomtown’s flavor is consistent, pervasive, and integrated into the mechanics: exactly what flavor should be.
Locations are also handled well – you can build Deeds to generate income (and win the game), but it comes at the risk that another faction will invade your property and take the benefits for themselves. It never felt oppressive, and the movement rules (though obtuse) proved to be pretty effective at controlling which actions made a gameplay impact. You can play Doomtown with up to four players, and Chezni was the first to recognize that this system of locations makes it vastly more scalable than most other games when it comes to multiplayer.
The battle phase – or Shootouts – is probably the aspect which felt a little too random for my tastes, though my feelings on this may decrease as I learn more. I won’t go in to the details here, but you draw a poker hand to determine who wins the shootout and the number of cards you draw is influenced by your Dudes and their Gear. I still haven’t quite gotten my head around the strategy to this, but I can at least appreciate that there is strategy (I’m looking at you, MtG). It’s worth noting that your Dudes are unique (unless specified otherwise) and that they can easily be removed from the game – meaning if you put four of a Dude in your deck, you can only have one installed at a time and if one of them gets removed from the game you can’t re-install them. It encourages a more diverse deck composition, but I think it also runs the risk of contributing to the feel of randomness.
There are a few other things which bothered me, most of which come back to the reliance on drawing cards to determine outcomes. First, you’re required to ante at the start of the round to participate in the random draw (no modifiers this time) to determine the First Player. In the decks we played, mine was very consistent (meaning I lost because the First Player draw is lowball and I usually had a good hand). If I were to change anything, I think making the First Player ante optional (forfeiting the First Player privileges if you don’t) would be it. Next, the “Gadgets” felt a too limited. To play a “Gadget”, you need to have an inventor, draw a card from your deck, and compare the card you drew with the difficulty of the Gadget. Since my deck was consistent, I never lost this – but I still didn’t use many Gadgets often because I only had two inventors and the location restrictions of Gear made equipping them a pain. I think I understand why it was done this way – to telegraph the more powerful Gadgets – but it certainly felt just a tad too restrictive.
Doomtown: Reloaded is another game with a lot of potential. It’s flavorful, distinct from the FFG LCGs, and I’m certainly interested in playing more of it. The more games I’ve played, the more styles of play I’ve discovered (building decks from dtdb.co has helped as well). So for now, this is a Tier 1 game.
Warhammer 40k: Invasion (high Tier Three)
Invasion is very much a product of the early experiments into LCGs, using the tropes from TCGs. The cards are split into support, units, and tactics (events), and you use the units to attack your opponent’s kingdom. Once two of the three areas of your opponent’s kingdom are defeated (or “burning”), you win. Defense can only be mounted from units in the defending area, and you can only attack with units in your “battlefield” (another of the three areas). What made this game unique was that putting units in your “kingdom” or “quest” zones allowed you to either gather more resources or draw more cards – in a one-to-one relationship with the damage the unit would produce otherwise. This was quite similar to the domains of Call of Cthulhu, but extended to card draw and allowed you to move units around in a limited fashion. In other words, your units and support allowed you to either provide some attack or serve double duty as both defense and resource production – encouraging some defensive play rather than an all-out attack.
The deck building rules were also intriguing – factions were split into Order and Chaos and you can only choose cards from those factions. It also becomes cheaper to use cards from another faction the more of that faction’s cards you already have in play – this encourages either mono or hybrid deck building rather than splashing just for high-power cards (with the added benefit of slowing the game while you build up your resource production).
Despite all this, I didn’t feel any particular motivation to continue playing. While there were interesting mechanics at play, the combat was nothing special. The tactics cards weren’t as oppressive as they are in Magic (or even Ashes), so this game gets a high Tier Three – almost a Tier Two, but not quite.
Warhammer 40k: Conquest (Tier Two)
Whenever I start a new card game for this list, I am faced with a choice: do you play the starter decks designed to teach you the mechanics or do you play the highly optimized decks you can find online? On the one hand, playing the starter decks will get you a feel for a “traditional” game and introduce you to the mechanics. On the other hand, the optimized decks will show you what players did with that and how well the system hangs together when stress tested. For this game, I opted to try out a couple decks found online; I say all this to balance my following opinion.
You play with a Warlord (with two health bars!), controlling various armies and support units. The armies can travel to any one of five planets to battle for resources. But here’s where it gets interesting: battles only happen at the first planet (the card up for contention) and any planets with a warlord. The rest of the planets stay in an uneasy peace, only contesting the resources of the planet though Command points. This creates an interesting balance between maintaining control to gain resources and contesting the first planet to win the struggle. Sadly, in our games, controlling the planets didn’t really get you closer to victory.
The game ends once someone has three planets with the same icon, which is where I think the problems begin. Because there are only three types of icons (and some planets have all three), there isn’t much room for a “strategic” loss – at worst, your opponent might need to score four planets instead of three. If there were fewer icons per card or more icon types, the game could include more interesting strategy, at the expense of a longer game.
The cards themselves are pretty straightforward – the only types being units, supports, and events. Unfortunately, they also seemed somewhat unbalanced – certain cards just seemed better. Other cards had noninteractive combos – bringing back expensive units for 1 resource. Perhaps the appearance of imbalance was due to our inexperience with the game, perhaps it was due to choosing tournament-worthy decks. Either way, Conquest has potential. I’m just not sure it’s enough to make me play this game over the other Tier One games, which is why it goes into Tier Two.